Over the course of its elliptical orbit, the moon Enceladus is squeezed unevenly by Saturn’s gravitational pull and deforms from a spherical shape into a football shape and back again. […]
When our Sun was a young star, 4.56 billion years ago, what is now our solar system was just a disk of rocky dust and gas. Over tens of millions […]
For decades, science fiction authors have imagined scenarios in which life thrives on the harsh surfaces of Mars or our Moon, or in the oceans below the icy surfaces of […]
In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the center of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one […]
The ROSINA (Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis) instrument aboard the Rosetta mission revolutionized our understanding of cometary material composition. One of Rosetta’s key findings is the complexity […]
Analysis of multiple rocks found at the bottom of Jezero Crater on Mars, where the Perseverance rover landed in 2020, reveals significant interaction between the rocks and liquid water, according […]
Caltech microbiologists have discovered bacteria that feed on manganese and use the metal as their source of calories. Such microbes were predicted to exist over a century ago, but none […]
Caltech scientists have discovered a new species of worm thriving in the extreme environment of Mono Lake. This new species, temporarily dubbed Auanema sp., has three different sexes, can survive […]
Recently, astronomers announced the discovery that a star called TRAPPIST-1 is orbited by seven Earth-size planets. Three of the planets reside in the “habitable zone,” the region around a star […]
A new study is the first to show that living organisms can be persuaded to make silicon-carbon bonds–something only chemists had done before. Scientists at Caltech “bred” a bacterial protein […]
